Please upgrade your browser.

From the Contents of Esoteric Classes

Esoteric Lessons Part II: Prague, 3-29-11

84. EL, Prague, 3-29-'11

If we want to tread an
occult-development path, we're given certain verses or formulas
to help us, which have the power to develop our higher spiritual
organs if we use them correctly. They were given to us by the masters
of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings. (Thursday verse.)

If we want to immerse
ourselves in the first lines of our morning exercise:

In
pure rays of light
Gleams the Godhead of the world …

we'll gain nothing for our
elevation into the spiritual world if we only let the literal meaning of
thee words work on us. For we should realize that we can't see the Godhead
in physical sunrays — we must look for them in their sublime
spirituality behind the sunbeams. The latter are only the only the
outer clothing of the Godhead. We should create a picture out of the
spirit for our meditation and not take one from the outer world for
this.

To begin with, we must
eliminate everything that reminds us of our outer surroundings from our
thoughts; we must be able to forget all the big and small thing that
motivate us in daily life; all outer impressions should be silent
within us.

If we've prepared
ourselves like this, we'll be immersing ourselves and our thoughts
and feelings in these lines in the right way. After we've done
these meditations for a longer or shorter time, we should then try to
empty our soul of these thoughts also. Thereby, the soul gets into a
quiet condition, and when the intellect is silenced, a human
being's higher members are lifted out of his physical body and
he enters the super-sensible world.

But a pupil hasn't yet
attained everything thereby. For if he isn't in the right soul
state and hasn't prepared himself a long time by working at his
defects, that is, if he doesn't enter the spiritual world with
the right humility and a correct knowledge of his bad qualities, then
this spiritual will appear to him in the wrong light. One could
compare this with a man who's accustomed to wearing red glasses
indoors and who forget to take them off when he goes outside; then he
would see things in a red light so that they're quite different
from what they really are. Likewise, an occultist would be judging
things in the super-sensible world wrongly if he saw them through the
colored glasses of his personality. For instance, he wouldn't
see the angels who stand one stage higher than man as the radiant
beings that they are — they would appear before him in terrible
animal forms or as other grotesque things. If he would meet Luciferic
or Ahrimanic beings between the angel and human levels on the astral
plane, they might seem to be shining, radiant angels, masters of
wisdom or other dissembling, alluring figures to lead him astray,
because he's still mastered by his pride and his own
personality too much. An occultist must especially guard against this
and be sure that he gets rid of his pride. For if we want to tread an
occult path, we can only prepare ourselves with the greatest humility
in our heart and through unlimited reverence for the divine.

There are other formulas
that can lead to the development of higher organs and to Imagination,
Inspiration and Intuition. The exercises can be done wrongly or can
be misunderstood, so that we're led down a wrong path. For
instance, if one would meditate: A part of the Godhead rests in
me — with a certain egotistical feeling, one just cultivates
pride in oneself, reinforces one's personality, and one would
overlook the fact that part of Godliness can be found in every
animal, plant and in all of God's creations. To be able to
enter higher worlds, however, we must leave everything that's
connected with personality behind in the physical world. We must
especially acquire a subtle feeling for the truth. For if an
occultist doesn't have this, he'll soon see that he has
to take the consequences. An occultist must not excuse himself by
saying that he thought that he was telling the truth. That
doesn't suffice for an occultist, for he's responsible
for each of his words, and he has to take the consequences for his
untruthfulness even if he thought he was saying the truth.

It isn't easy to stick to
the path in conventional life; things often have a dishonest tinge to
them. How often one hears: I thought it was the truth. It's not
easy to tread a spiritual path. A good method that anyone can use to
arrive at greater clarity about his own personality is to look at
sections of his life at least once a year, say on his birthday. Then
we should ask ourselves: What good and bad deeds can I list for this
period? Then if we examine ourselves seriously, we'll find that
in most cases we let our good deeds be done out of an inner impulse,
and that they didn't originate from our personality This inner
impulse is our guardian angel who stimulates our good deeds. But we
shouldn't rely on this completely and think: My guardian angel
will give me the impulse — because that would be quite wrong. Our
guardian angel would soon leave us, in a certain respect.

If we continue these
exercises for a number of years, we'll find that nothing helps us to
discover and get rid of our personality defects better than this statement
of our account. Thereby we'll gradually prepare ourselves to tread
the occult path in a productive way, as we free ourselves ever more
from our personality and make ourselves empty in a certain respect,
so that the Christ principle can enter us in the way that Paul says:
Not I, but Christ I me. This filling of oneself with the Christ
principle frees our personality from egoism and leads to the
perception of the highest. The name “Christ” isn't
really the name of the principle that is supposed to be expressed
therewith; the divine power that one designates with this name has
another name that should not be uttered. Therefore the masters of
wisdom and of the harmony of feelings didn't say this name when
they said the following verse in their consecrated hours: